With critics seeking to preempt his message, President Barack Obama will use the backdrop of historic Faneuil Hall later Wednesday to defend his signature health care reform law as he tries to diffuse the mounting criticism of the Affordable Care Act and its troubled rollout.

Matt Murphy, State House News Service

With critics seeking to preempt his message, President Barack Obama will use the backdrop of historic Faneuil Hall later Wednesday to defend his signature health care reform law as he tries to diffuse the mounting criticism of the Affordable Care Act and its troubled rollout.

Obama plans to highlight the bipartisan experience of Massachusetts where Democrats and Republicans worked together after the 2006 state reform law’s passage to make sure it worked, contrasting that with the infighting in Congress over repeal, according to a senior White House advisor.

David Simas, assistant to Obama and deputy senior adviser for communications and strategy, said the president will also highlight the experience in Massachusetts of getting people enrolled through its state health exchange and the popular benefits of the Affordable Care Act, including protections against being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions and the elimination of lifetime coverage limits for the gravely ill.

“Republicans and Democrats came together to not only push reform through. After the bill was signed and enacted, everyone came together once it was law to make sure that health reform in Massachusetts worked,” said Simas, a Taunton native who worked for Gov. Deval Patrick before leaving for the White House in 2009.

Obama’s visit to Boston and the stage where former Republican Gov. Mitt Romney joined with Sen. Edward Kennedy and Democratic legislative leaders to sign Massachusetts health reform in 2006 comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was testifying before Congress on Wednesday about the federal health care exchange and the problems plaguing the website that have made it difficult for Americans in many states to enroll in new health plans.

During his 2012 run for president, Romney defended the Massachusetts health care reform law while opposing the Affordable Care Act and arguing states should be free to tailor their own reform laws to meet local considerations.

The Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday night said that by the end of November the Healthcare.gov site will be “functioning smoothly for the vast majority of users.” The agency detailed a number of fixes made to the site since the Oct. 1 rollout that will allow the government to process nearly 17,000 account registrants per hour with an error rate near zero.

Business groups in Massachusetts have criticized the Obama administration for rejecting Gov. Deval Patrick’s request for a waiver from Affordable Care Act regulations that will limit the number of rating factors insurance carrier can use to calculate premiums. Associated Industries of Massachusetts wrote a letter to the White House Tuesday asked Obama to reconsider, warning insurance premiums for some small businesses could increase more than 50 percent.

The Retailers Association of Massachusetts on Wednesday said double-digit premium increases for small businesses in the immediate wake of the 2006 reforms required adjustments to the law, including the use of the group size and cooperative wellness initiatives as rating factors that drove down prices.

“We are hopeful the President hears our concerns and goes back to the drawing board on these regulatory decisions - which can be fixed without an act of Congress - in order to protect the Massachusetts reform, the ACA and most importantly our Main Streets,” said Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association.

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who advised both Romney and Obama on the development of their health reform laws, spoke to reporters on a conference call Tuesday afternoon about the experience in Massachusetts implementing the 2006 reforms.

“The bottom line is that it ramped up to success,” Gruber said, saying it “isn’t interesting or important” that not many people are signed up for health coverage through the federal exchange a month after its opening.

“We’ve covered two-thirds of our uninsured citizens. We’ve lowered premiums in the individual market. And we have a widely popular law, with about two-thirds public support for our law,” Gruber said, speaking of Massachusetts. “That same kind of outcome will happen at the national level, but it will take time. We need to be patient and measure the outcomes in months and years, not days and weeks.”

Gruber said that in the first month that Massachusetts residents were able to sign up for private health insurance through the state-based exchange in February 2007, only 123 consumers subscribed, or 0.3 percent of the eventual enrollment. By the end of the year when the mandate was set to kick in and residents faced penalties for not having insurance, 36,000 consumers had subscribed.

Jon Kingsdale, managing director of the Wakely Consulting Group in Boston who was appointed by Romney as the first executive director of the Massachusetts Health Connector, said the Massachusetts law did not create “sticker shock” for insurance subscribers, and actually increased private competition to sell plans through the Connector.

Kingsdale said the number of carriers in Massachusetts competing to offer plans through the Massachusetts exchange increased from six or seven when it started to 10 carriers. “It’s an extremely competitive market,” he said, arguing on the White House conference call that insuring more of the population led to an increase in patients seeking and receiving regular medical care.

Kingsdale also said that some initial bids to sell health insurance through the exchange came in higher than Romney predicted, but by the end of the bidding process there were products being sold through the marketplace at a range of prices allowing people to get “good insurance for significantly less than what they were paying.”

Obama has also drawn fire over comments made during the Affordable Care Act debate that no one who likes their health insurance will lose their plan. Simas said the vast majority of Americans – 85 percent – receive their health care through employers. Only those in the individual market who have left their plan or whose carrier made substantial changes to their health plan will be required to purchase new coverage with benefits that comport to the Affordable Care Act. Those with plans before 2010 that have been unchanged will be grandfathered in, Simas said.

The Massachusetts Republican Party said Obama was seeking “sanctuary” in Massachusetts from the “rolling Obamacare disaster.”

“With people getting kicked off of their insurance and unable to sign up, even Massachusetts Democrats are whacking Obamacare,” said party chair Kirsten Hughes, referencing Sen. Elizabeth Warren who admitted the administration “dropped the ball” on the rollout, but went on to defend the law. “It's clear that both Red Sox Nation and Massachusetts Democrats wish Obama would just stay in Washington and focus on fixing the issues. What we don’t need are more of his whoppers like 'if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.’"

In a blog post prior to Obama’s arrival, Josh Archambault of the right-leaning Pioneer Institute noted differences in the health care landscapes in Massachusetts compared to states like Arizona, Texas and Alabama in predicting different results from the ACA in states across the country. He also stated that health care premiums have been on the rise in Massachusetts and are the highest in the country.

Archambault pointed to the requests from Gov. Deval Patrick and the Democrat-controlled Legislature for waivers from the law to prevent increases in small group health insurance premiums. And he noted Massachusetts had a head start on other states, expanding access with an already low uninsured rate to begin with.

Reducing emergency department visits, another goal of proponents of the 2006 state health insurance access law, has also proven difficult, Archambault noted. Noting small increases in ER visits each year between 2006 and 2010, Archambault wrote, “Residents still show up in the ER far too often. Nearly half of all visits are avoidable, and those on subsidized coverage are much more likely to visit the ER when compared to the privately insured. The cost of an ER visit has gone up 35.6% between 2006 and 2010.”

The cost of “free care,” or care delivered to uninsured or underinsured patients, dropped from $739 million in 2005 to $396 million in 2008, but Archambault pointed out that it’s been on the rise since then to $475 million in 2010.

Kingsdale said the technical challenges of rolling out the Massachusetts exchange in 2007 paled in comparison to the national effort, but did explain that some provisions of the law had to be delayed, including a three-month postponement for enrolling those due to receive free or subsidized coverage through the Connector while the state built its premium billing and collection system.

“I’m not going to second guess CMS on the ACA. We had to postpone a few things because we couldn’t meet our timetable,” Kingsdale said.

The Obama administration has already delayed by a year the employer mandate to provide employee health coverage, and some Democrats in Congress are now calling for a delay of the individual mandate beyond the March 31 deadline to sign up for coverage.

Gov. Deval Patrick is scheduled to introduce Obama at Faneuil Hall, but the other governor most closely associated with health reform in Massachusetts won’t be around. Simas said the White House did not reach out to Gov. Romney to see if he would attend.